Archives For February 2017

I see myself as a child–carving pumpkins, getting ready for school, biking into the horizon, coloring with chalk. Everything is painted bright and airy. I hug my mother and my father. They see life in me. My grandmother plays the piano, and I fall into an ecstatic trance. I shoot the soccer ball as if everything depended on it. There are vocab tests and friends and secret lovers. At church the priest is an apostle. I cling to every word because it comes from the mouth of God. All moments are eternity and infinity. All is new.

Billions of years pale in comparison to the purity of youth. “Be as a child.” It is not about dependence on God or about trust (though it is). It is about eternity. “Be as a child” is to say, “Everything is an endless mystery, not to be solved but to be lived.” When you wake up in the morning, trumpets sound. When you walk down the street, angels sing above you. When you get in bed to rest, demons emerge in the dark.

Realism kills us. It takes us away from the real. Realism is a learnt ideology, but idealism is reality. One can’t heal or save a realist. Such an experience is only for the young romantic.

Renoir is the painter of the divinized mundane. All is nymph and spirit, ordinary and typical. Impressionism is romantic realism. It is Catholic art, art of the God-man. Renoir’s art is unmediated perception, giving it a quality of pure authenticity.

I get it. The world is a mess. All of us are imperfect. Things fall apart, and they won’t ever be exactly as we want them to be. There is illness, death, murder, racism, sexism, phobias, and political discord.

“Your idealism has no place here,” I’ve heard, and that comment seems justified. Some people have become so disheartened that they fear looking at the news. It’s all screwed up, and this is just the beginning, they say.

“Your morality and prayer have no place here. Don’t pretend to be pious,” I’ve heard, and that comment seems justified. There is so much hypocrisy, so much phoniness. The world needs more raw humanity and less holiness, they say.

But no. But no. It cannot be so. We need to reclaim idealism, and we need to reclaim holiness. I’m not talking about the fake idealism of utopias and the stale holiness of porcelain statues. I’m talking about the ideals of those who have had dreams. I’m talking about the sanctity of martyrs whose blood stains the dirt and runs into polluted streams as if to cleanse them.

Don’t submit to mediocrity, to sinfulness, to “reality.” Reality–that is, the reality of those who have resigned their lives to what is possible–is empty. Realism has died, and we have killed it.

Be like God. Be like Christ, whose hands were nailed to the cross for being an idealist. Be like Christ, who rose from the dead to live another day. Be like Christ. After all, you don’t want anything less. Ask Christ into your life, and he will show you what you can be: another Christ.

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He was a man of God: ‘Another Christ’…. given over without reserve and without schedule. He wanted to be another Christ, and he achieved it. He became completely assimilated in Christ: Christ’s desires were his desires; Christ’s words were his words… He taught us so intensely that we should be other Christs that I wanted it, but as Christ was so high, I discovered that I could be another Christ imitating this man who really was another Christ. So I left for the novitiate of the Society of Jesus. –Fr. Victor Risopatron, S.J., about St. Alberto Hurtado, S.J.